Fabulous Nest Friday - Strawberry Shortcake Intervention...

I realize that I have been heavy on the food posts the last few weeks; even my craft project this week was food related. However, those of you who know me know that food is what I do best, and after a long winter of less than desirable produce I am so excited to have ingredients like good strawberries at my disposal. You may recall my mid-winter post on creative uses for canned beans; if I can muster enthusiasm for pork & beans you can only imagine what's going to happen when the fruit trucks start rolling into town!

Last week I was invited out to supper, and I offered to bring dessert. I was wandering through the baking aisle contemplating making a chocolate cream pie, when I remembered there was a special on strawberries. The cream pie got booted out of my mind...I had all winter to make desserts out of milk and eggs. Now was the time for Strawberry Shortcake!

Some people don't get very excited about this dessert, and for the longest time I couldn't understand why. Then I had a strawberry shortcake made with those ubiquitous little yellow cakes, and I understood. What I don't understand is why anyone would use those things. My apologies if you think they are good, but friends, you don't know what you're missing! Allow me to enlighten you...

Strawberry Shortcake, East Coast style, is composed of freshly sliced sweetened strawberries, whipped cream, and a tea biscuit!!! NOT a tired, stale little yellow cake. I promise you, strawberry shortcake done right is a delight. If you must have cake, fine, have cake, but make it a good cake, like a buttery pound cake or a light and lovely angel food cake. Just no yellow cake pucks, please! But you should try the biscuit. It's really really good! We can even make it sweet...here, I'll show you....

See, doesn't that look better! And there's sugar in the biscuits and on the biscuits. So give it a try. Put the cello pack of yellow cakes DOWN!!! There you go.

I will confess that that is not real whipped cream, for two good reasons. The first is that my hand mixer is broken. The second is that I'm dairy intolerant and whole fat real whipped cream, the stuff of my dreams, would darn near do me in. And so, this is Cool Whip. Still delicious, and more acceptable than LITTLE YELLOW CAKES. (I will regale you with tales of my quest for dairy free desserts another time...)

I came up with another shortcake recipe this week that I was rather proud of (I've been patting myself on the back a lot this week...I'm due to botch something...I'm planning on making more jam later...hmmm...). After making the wonderfully sugary tea biscuits for the shortcake, I decided to make a batch of biscuits with whole wheat flour for regular consumption. I'll be honest, pretty much everything I ate this week short of pork chops ran the risk of having strawberry rhubarb jam smeared on it (come to think of it, that might be good...) so my system was probably pathetically thankful to get whole wheat anything. I was getting some biscuits ready for breakfast the other morning, and just before I put the jam on I thought "what about a breakfast shortcake?" I had biscuits and berries...all I needed was a topping. Of course, yogurt!! I had some French Vanilla soy yogurt in the fridge, so I took it out and set to assembling my creation. It was great! Kind of like a breakfast parfait, but with a biscuit instead of granola. My camera batteries died as I was trying to get a photo, so I can't show you what it looked like. I didn't sugar the berries for this one but if you like your breakfast extra sweet, by all means go ahead. Without the sugar, though, this makes for a tasty and nutritious breakfast, and one that would be fun to serve guests for a weekend brunch!

It's Fabulous Nest Friday, so hop on over to Housewife Bliss to and and take part! Have a wonderful weekend!